Software failures, faults and inconsistencies on both the application and operating system (OS) sides exact a price on computer users, network administrators and others. Applications may crash due to run-time errors, hardware updates and incompatibilities and other issues. An operating system may hang or fail to deliver expected services due to driver conflicts, conflicting updates, security breaches and other issues. In any case, a variety of types of software faults stress the user support systems of many software vendors. This may be particularly the case in larger or more complex network sites, such as sites utilizing enterprise server or other clusters. For these sites several hours of telephone consultation may be required to fix software faults encountered by users.
Some software applications have incorporated updating or healing features. Microsoft Corp.'s Office™ suite for instance is equipped with certain self-repair features, including an ability to detect the deletion of significant associated files which are then automatically reinstalled. The Microsoft WindowsXP™ operating system for its part may alert a user when OS updates become available, through Internet or other connectivity. However, the WindowsXP™ repair function is not entirely automatic, in that it does not retrieve necessary updates over the Internet or other connectivity directly. That operating system instead builds a directory of pending or possible patches which the user then manually chooses to install. A user moreover may not program the OS or application update service to filter out, automatically install or otherwise process software fixes according to flexible criteria. Other problems exist.